Can't get excited about Bioshock

quarryman

- Instead of cropping the FOV for 4:3 displays and making all 4:3 owners mad in doing so, we slightly extended the vertical FOV for standard def mode: we never wanted to have black bars on people’s displays. (This way, everybody is happy…) This does mean that people playing on a standard def display see slightly more vertical space, but, this does not significantly affect the game-play experience and, we felt that it best served our goal of keeping the game experience as close as possible to the original design and art vision on both types of displays. Reports of the widescreen FOV being a crop of the 4:3 FOV are completely false.

I told ya so

I don't get this.

This does mean that people playing on a standard def display see slightly more vertical space

then

Reports of the widescreen FOV being a crop of the 4:3 FOV are completely false.

are these not contradictory? It states the 4:3 gets more vertical FOV but the widescreen is NOT a crop?!

mcgovern

Exactly, and the whole point of widescreen is that it emulates human vision because we see more to the sides than we do vertically.

joe_chicken

quarryman wrote:

are these not contradictory? It states the 4:3 gets more vertical FOV but the widescreen is NOT a crop?!

It's just spin.

They are claiming that they originally designed it with widescreen and then 'added' more to the vertical for the 4:3....*cough*bullshìt

I don't give a crap either way though, if you didn't know it was cropped from 4:3, it wouldn't make a difference, just enjoy the game!

Ciaran500

quarryman wrote:

are these not contradictory? It states the 4:3 gets more vertical FOV but the widescreen is NOT a crop?!

The widescreen is not a crop since the whole game was designed to be played at 16:9. The for 4:3 instead cutting the sides off the 16:9 image they increased the vertical FoV to take up the extra space. Someone posted this in the Xbox thread, explains it pretty well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_matte

koneko

MOH wrote:

And what happens in a few years when they stop supporting the game?

In all likelihood they'll disable this check at some point. People ask the same thing about Steam, what if Valve close down, what about all my games? Valve said they have a plan in place that if that were to ever happen, they release the update and make sure you can still run your games and all the checking is disabled/gone.

Hopefully they'll take all this negative feedback on board and relax this activation or disable it entirely after a while. Supreme Commander got a patch to remove the SecuROM for instance, I think that was about a month after the release (I could be wrong), after people complained.

Ciaran500

super_furry wrote:

But it's not even remotely doing that. As of right now, the game is available to download from the regular pirate spots. All it's doing is punishing the normal user who buys games and making life harder for them, so if anything, it's an incentive to pirate.

Retail version hasn't been cracked, but people stuck up DVD copies anyway.

joe_chicken wrote:

It's just spin.

They are claiming that they originally designed it with widescreen and then 'added' more to the vertical for the 4:3....*cough*bullshìt

I don't give a crap either way though, if you didn't know it was cropped from 4:3, it wouldn't make a difference, just enjoy the game!

Why are people calling this spin? Look back at any screen shots and you can see its been the same all along.

joe_chicken

Ciaran500 wrote:

Why are people calling this spin? Look back at any screen shots and you can see its been the same all along.

They are claiming they designed the game for widescreen first...

But then they claim, instead of cropping the sides of the widescreen to get the 4:3 (easy), they 'added bits' to the top of the 16:9 (hard)... which one would you choose?

They are either spinning it, or are really stupid and like doing a lot of unnecessary work.

Ciaran500

What? They just have to change a setting in the ini file to do it.

Look how easy the third party mod that was released does it.

Elessar

Please don't tell me the Xbox version requires an internet connection?!

Ciaran500

Elessar wrote:

Please don't tell me the Xbox version requires an internet connection?!

Nope, works like any other game.

Elessar

Phew!

Any word on retailers releasing today?

joe_chicken

Ciaran500 wrote:

What?

Take the characters arm for example.

If they designed the game the way the widescreen is in game (without the mod). Then they would only need to design the amount of the arm that is on screen i.e. less than the 4:3

They are claiming they designed less of the arm, and then added parts of it when changing their design for 4:3. This doesn't make sense.

I haven't seen the mod.

Why didn't they have the full 16:9 FoV without the mod then?

/EDIT Just like to reiterate, I don't really care about this, but it does sound like spin, it might not be. Roll on tomorrow.

koneko

The FOV designed the way it is could be intentional by the artists/designers, a closer/smaller FOV like that would make the game feel more claustrophobic, which (considering the setting) could be exactly what they wanted.

Either way, there's a user mod now, and they're going to change it to give people the option, so storm in a teacup over.

Ciaran500

joe_chicken wrote:

Take the characters arm for example.

If they designed the game the way the widescreen is in game (without the mod). Then they would only need to design the amount of the arm that is on screen i.e. less than the 4:3

They are claiming they designed less of the arm, and then added parts of it when changing their design for 4:3. This doesn't make sense.

Thats not how it works, they have to design a good chunk of the army anyway since when you swing the wrench it comes out infront of you. They even say it in the news posted earlier. Its no extra work to do it either way. They decided to do it this way.

joe_chicken wrote:

I haven't seen the mod.

Why didn't they have the full 16:9 FoV without the mod then?

They do have the full 16:9 fov, thats what the whole game is designed for. All the cutscenes and menus are 16:9 and when viewed in 4:3 you get it letterboxed.

joe_chicken

koneko wrote:

The FOV designed the way it is could be intentional by the artists/designers, a closer/smaller FOV like that would make the game feel more claustrophobic, which (considering the setting) could be exactly what they wanted.

Now that definitely sounds like spin.
I kid.

Ciaran500 wrote:

They decided to do it this way.

Ok, I stand corrected. Now to find that mod

hotnipples

Anybody seen any shops breaking the release date, around Cork or Waterford? I have a potentially boring thursday night ahead of me that I would like to pass playing this. Reading the EG forums it looks like people all over the UK got their pre-orders this morning.. bastards.

wayne040576

koneko wrote:

In all likelihood they'll disable this check at some point. People ask the same thing about Steam, what if Valve close down, what about all my games? Valve said they have a plan in place that if that were to ever happen, they release the update and make sure you can still run your games and all the checking is disabled/gone.

Hopefully they'll take all this negative feedback on board and relax this activation or disable it entirely after a while. Supreme Commander got a patch to remove the SecuROM for instance, I think that was about a month after the release (I could be wrong), after people complained.

Hopefully you're right about that. I don't know if you were paying attention to the tech news last week but google ended their google video purchase service that supplied drm'd movies\tv downloads in a similar fashion. They decided to pull out of the business for some reason and sent all customers an email telling them that
they were going deactivate all of the tv\movies they had paid to download and refund the money. So for anyone who used this service, they lost all of their content.

MooseJam

Ciaran500 wrote:

I told ya so

lol, dude thats such a load of spin, the widescreen is a crop and zoom, it's been making numerous people sick playing the game, the field of view places your head two feet in front of your body and is causing motion sickness, anyway I'm not really bothered now, I'm not buying a game that lets you install twice


You will see more in widescreen. We use a different projection matrix; there is no squashing or stretching of the image involved.

- Chris Kline, Lead Programmer, Bioshock

Ciaran500

MooseJam wrote:

lol, dude thats such a load of spin, the widescreen is a crop and zoom, it's been making numerous people sick playing the game, the field of view places your head two feet in front of your body and is causing motion sickness, anyway I'm not really bothered now, I'm not buying a game that lets you install twice

The recent demo of skate causes motion sickness when I play it, that proves the devs obviously screwed up :rolleyes:

Why would they put spin on a problem that could be fixed so simply?

You can install twice at once. When you uninstall it you can install it again.

MooseJam wrote:

You will see more in widescreen. We use a different projection matrix; there is no squashing or stretching of the image involved.

- Chris Kline, Lead Programmer, Bioshock - 3months ago

Things can change in 3 months and he wasn't working on the PC version anyway.

MooseJam

Ciaran500 wrote:

The recent demo of skate causes motion sickness when I play it, that proves the devs obviously screwed up :rolleyes:

if it's a common problem then yes abosolutely they screwed up, making people sick is a screwup

Ciaran500 wrote:

Why would they put spin on a problem that could be fixed so simply?

For PR purposes , whats better do you think, say thats the way it was meant to be or admit they screwed up

Ciaran500 wrote:

You can install twice at once. When you uninstall it you can install it again.

what happens when windows dies or your harddrive dies or your laptop is stolen etc etc etc, it's a load of pants there is no justifying it

Ciaran500 wrote:

Things can change in 3 months and he wasn't working on the PC version anyway.

well the decent thing to do would be to say so, sorry guy's widescreen will not be seing more now we think it would be better if it saw less

WellyJ

MooseJam wrote:

For PR purposes , whats better do you think, say thats the way it was meant to be or admit they screwed up

To be honest denying there is a problem is worse PR than supplying a quick patch to fix the problem.

So yes, it would have been better to admit it was a screw up, if indeed that's what it was.

Having played through the demo with and without the fix I really don't give a **** about this "problem".

99% of people would not have noticed this had it not been posted by someone on a forum.

Sad Professor

Does anyone know what the FOV in the non-hacked version actually is? I assume it's 75? I know a lot of people prefer 90 (and higher) but hasn't 75 kinda become the norm lately? Halo 2's FOV was even less afaik. This provides a very narrow view of your surroundings (a big disadvantage for multiplayer) but allows for greater immersion in the environment, you feel like you're actually there.

A lot of people seem to have a very basic misunderstanding about what widescreen actually is. They see it as 4:3 with more width. This is how tv salesmen sold widescreen tvs by telling everyone they'd see MORE. But the truth is cropping a 4:3 image to achieve a wider aspect ratio is a perfectly valid widescreen method. Filmmakers have been doing it for years. Go and watch the P&S version of T2 or Titanic and you'll see what I mean. The real advantage of widescreen is that it better suits the human eye's peripheral vision.

Games are different of course and I'm not saying there isn't a problem here but if there is then the issue is with the FOV being too narrow. How they achieved 4:3/16:9 has nothing to do with it. Ether-way this wasn't a mistake.

koneko

Whine whine whine.

Back on topic. For those getting the retail PC version, the activation server is up so no waiting for that.

Ciaran500

MooseJam wrote:

if it's a common problem then yes abosolutely they screwed up, making people sick is a screwup

Its actually pretty common accross FPSs in general

MooseJam wrote:

For PR purposes , whats better do you think, say thats the way it was meant to be or admit they screwed up

Cause this is going down great from a PR perspective. Saying they over looked something and quickly releasing a patch would be a much better and obvious solution.

MooseJam wrote:

what happens when windows dies or your harddrive dies or your laptop is stolen etc etc etc, it's a load of pants there is no justifying it

You call them and they give you a new key. Like most games I'd expect a patch removing the protection once the initial surge of sales dies down.

MooseJam

WellyJ wrote:

Having played through the demo with and without the fix I really don't give a **** about this "problem".

neither do I now theres a fix, but the securerom is definately a deal breaker

MooseJam

Ciaran500 wrote:

You call them and they give you a new key. Like most games I'd expect a patch removing the protection once the initial surge of sales dies down.

I bought the game already, I shouldn't have to be calling people, this will not be a problem with the cracked version of the game ! lots more people will go for it because of this

WellyJ

MooseJam wrote:

I bought the game already

I'm not buying a game that lets you install twice

Moojuice

Well said Sad Professor. The technique of adding to the top and bottom so there is no letter boxing is a well known technique in movie making. I dont see what the problem is. It is a hell of a lot better then pan and scan. That would be a disaster. If there were bars at the top and bottom of the 4:3 image people would be giving out. They are damned if they dao and damned if they don't.

Smellyirishman

WellyJ wrote:

I think the first sentence was hypothetical.

MOH

Reports on the 2kgames forums that some of those who got the game today in the UK (either pre-release orders or stores breaking the date) have managed to activate the game, 2kgames have denied this is true. Lots of Steam customers unhappy they have to wait until tomorrow.